Daily Inspiration Quote by William Petty

“Money is the best rule of commerce” lands with the blunt confidence of an era trying to turn trade into something like physics: measurable, comparable, legible. Petty, one of the early architects of political economy, is writing in a 17th-century England where markets are expanding, colonial ventures are accelerating, and the state is discovering it can count people, ships, and taxes to build power. His intent isn’t poetic; it’s administrative. He wants a common unit that lets commerce be governed, audited, and optimized.

The word “rule” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not just “tool” or “medium,” but a standard of judgment: money becomes the yardstick that decides what counts as value, what qualifies as rational exchange, what deserves investment. That’s the subtextual pivot from older moral vocabularies of “just price” and communal obligation toward a colder arithmetic where worth is what can be priced. Commerce, in this framing, stops being a tangle of relationships and becomes a system that can be managed from above.

Petty’s broader project of “political arithmetic” makes the line feel like a mission statement. Money, for him, is the lingua franca that allows disparate goods, labor, and risk to be translated into a single register. The quiet provocation is that translation also flattens: it strips away qualities that don’t convert neatly into numbers. In praising money as the “best” rule, Petty isn’t merely describing markets; he’s endorsing a worldview in which governance, policy, and even social welfare can be made commensurable. The line works because it’s both a technical claim and a cultural declaration: the rise of measurement as authority.